Socially Networked Plane Spotters

[Cannoneer No. 4]

There's a guy on Twitter tracking a whole lot of air traffic in the Med.

http://twitter.com/FMCNL/

Radiocommunications Guru | Mil Aviation | Spy Technics | Radioscanner | Icom fan | Civilian Irregular OPSEC threat.

[Rex Brynen]

There's a guy on Twitter tracking a whole lot of air traffic in the Med.

http://twitter.com/FMCNL/

Radiocommunications Guru | Mil Aviation | Spy Technics | Radioscanner | Icom fan | Civilian Irregular OPSEC threat.

Everyone knows that ATC conversations can be listened to, in many cases online. The "guy on Twitter" has largely been summarizing the conversations from Maltese ATC, which anyone can access (I've had it on in the background since the attacks started).

It's nothing new--just part of the operational context. Almost all of what he is recounting are tankers, support aircraft, and ferry missions, not inbound strike packages (which, oddly, don't have plain language conversations about where they're going with foreign air traffic controllers...).

[CloseDanger]

He is also tracking suspicious movements, Gadaffi clan plane tail numbers and location. He has a regular ops cell there. He certainly is a signal man and I seem to recall that he stated where he worked. I did not see any OPSEC violation.

[CloseDanger]

Here...

[Cannoneer No. 4]

He's also introducing a lot of people to aviation communications, scanning, plane watching, and posting much in near real time. He's tweeting instead of reporting to some amateur radio magazine published three months later. And he is not alone.

http://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=lmml

http://www.flightradar24.com/

http://cencio4.wordpress.com/ - They dropped 40 conventional bombs on an unspecified airbase and, interestingly, to render them much more invisible, even to HF, VHF and UHF listeners that have been exploiting the possibility to listen to radio communications in the clear broadcasted by LiveATC.net, the B-2 used a REACH callsign, usually allocated to tanker, transport and support aircraft. This gives an idea of how the OPSEC problem was faced by the USAF: keeping in mind that aircraft spotters around the world, virtually interconnected by means of forums, websites, messageboards, Twitter, Facebook and any other social networking tool, are today capable of tracking aircraft movements even before aircraft depart their homebases with the various LiveATC.net, Flightradar24.com, ADS-B, etc., they decided to deceive them not using difficult and “suspect” zip-lip ops (no-radio) but masking aircraft callsigns. The result was satisfactory as the strikes of the B-2s as well as the TLAM attack were almost unexpected in spite of the technology in the hands of the aircraft enthusiasts meaning that there are still ways to achieve strategical surprise, if needed

Does a bomber operating under a transport callsign qualify as MILDEC?

[Entropy]

The cencio4 blog linked to by cannoneer is running a daily summary of air activity which is pretty good.